Not so long ago the inky newsprinted paper with its 10-point Times-Roman font on the kitchen table was an integral part of Americans' morning routine. The newspaper industry, romanticized for hundreds of years, represented modernism — the stark, straightforward rendering of information and news, neatly labeled. Readers learned to trust certain bylines and to understand signs of importance, such as the screaming banner headline. Most people believe the newspaper will never be replaced by a computer screen. After all, you can't take it with you on the Metro or spill your coffee on it.

Nevertheless, online newspapers are carving a niche of their own, especially among the news hounds, the computer savvy, and the young, who see the Internet as a viable medium for information and news. Online is a medium perfectly suited for people who have gone beyond MTV, beyond Entertainment Tonight, and even beyond Wired magazine. With its tendency to blur and blend media, the online newspaper is not as straightforward as its ink counterpart, even if it contains all of the news and information that is in the newspaper. The online newspaper is postmodern.

It is important to make a distinction between the modernist newspaper and the postmodernist newspaper, even though their owners do not want the public to differentiate: Brand-name recognition is important when it comes to luring advertisers. Think about the branding of washingtonpost.com by The Washington Post,, or of Mercury Center [formerly http://www0.mercurycenter.com] by the San Jose Mercury News. However, the distinction is there: The new medium means changes in the ways traditional newspaper readers understand and relate to the news.

Signs of the change are subtle but persistent. A reader recalled an article on the extinction of the spotted owl. Her colleague asked where she saw the story. "I saw it somewhere on washingtonpost.com," she said. Once she surely would have replied, "It was in yesterday's Style section," or "It was in the Sunday magazine" — emphasizing names and boundaries that are tied to the physical object, a meaningless distinction online.

Because online newspapers do not allow readers to thumb through and physically relate to the organization of the online publication, readers must organize and prioritize their news mentally. Those unfamiliar with the practice and design of the online newspaper might not realize that the spotted owl story was on the front page of the online newspaper but not the front page of the print paper. Inversely, many stories deemed important enough to run on the front page of the print edition are not deemed timely or important enough to run on the front of the paper's Web site.

As a former producer for washingtonpost.com, I can attest that human interest stories were often plucked from the Style section to be placed on the front page of the online version. And throughout the day a story might be moved from the top of the page to the bottom of the page (or sometimes vice versa, depending on whether an artist found a better photo to place with it). That practice is common in online journalism, with little thought given to the idea that a reader could be confused by such changes in presentation.